Democratizing innovation

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…roactive method. However, I am not the one inventing this thing up just to prove something to companies. My statements are based on Eric Von Hippel's work from the 80s: "The Sources of Innovation" and "Democratizing Innovation" - The Lead User Theory. And you need to see that this is not something new, as many are already doing it. The only thing is - they have to ask for it - explicitly like Dell and Starbucks, implicitly like Lego and Harley Davidson. What we suggest is something to enrich it a bit more - self initiated input, whether it is a current user or not. Moreover, we are giving back for the input, they aren't, while they still get the input? People want to contribute, Open Source, wikis, this discussion we are having here (thank you). You are right that most people do not want to participate and as you say out of those that hav…

Eric von Hippel's book "Democratizing Innovation" talks about this. The book is primarily about how end users more than ever are driving innovation, but he provides plenty of historical evidence of this being possible for a long time. There is a chapter that analyses the type of innovation that a user is likely to make versus the innovations a tool producer is likely to make. A user has the domain knowledge to realize that e.g. a tool with a particular shape might be necessary. A tool producer has the knowledge of metallurgy or tool production to realize that some new alloy might be a better fit for the type of stresses that this tool requires. He also notes that not all users will innovate, it will primarily be what he calls "lead users". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_user The book is CC licenced and available for free download. It's…

…own the the LA public library and picked up 10 stellar titles just this weekend, I highly recommend all of these: - Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software [MIT] - Prisoner's Dilemma [William Poundstone] - Thinking Strategically [Nalebuff] - Co-opetition [Nalebuff] - Cluetrain Manifesto [Searls] - Open Sources 2.0 [O'Reilly] - Innovator's Dilemma [Christensen] - Net Worth [Hagel] - Democratizing Innovation [von Hippel] - Fooled by Randomness [Taleb] Other books I always keep around are "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" (a history of DJ's and electronic music), The Singularity is Near, and some Calvin and Hobbes ;-) All the reading is most definitely worth it, if you don't feel that way you're not reading the right stuff. The best book I've ever read is probably Anna Karenina (Magarshack translation, not the Oprah version, which is iro…